It’s almost an automatic disqualification from mention on this blog.  Mojo Coffeehouse (corner of Public Rd and Baseline in Lafayette) serves Silver Canyon Coffee.  Can you believe it?  This tells me and all coffee lovers three things: you don’t know coffee, you have no interest in the quality of the final product, and your judgement can’t be trusted.  No other real coffee shop that I have been to in this area serves Silver Canyon.  Hotels and grocery stores serve Silver Canyon.  Coffee shops do not.  There is a reason.

Aside from that, I actually like Mojo.  It’s another good find out in Lafayette.  The space works great, with a mostly quiet atmosphere (aside from a cooler motor they need to replace), unobstructed views across the space, a corner building design that keeps patrons pretty well spread out along two walls (no bullpen feel), and a big table in a “conference room” that can be partitioned off.

They are serving Tea Spot teas, so at least they’ve made a good choice there.  Makes it even more bizarre to me that they are serving Silver Canyon.  Look people, there is a reason Silver Canyon and Brewing Market suck (and maybe this goes for Allegro too).  It’s because they’ve been in the Boulder scene for decades and they long, long ago lost their passion for innovation.  You look at the guys at Ozo, Conscious Coffees, Unseen Bean — these are the innovators, roasting with one or two machines in small batches, and constantly drinking their own coffee.  They are serious coffee aficionados, going for serious craft quality, as if they were making $12,000 violins.  Can anybody even remotely say this about Silver Canyon, Brewing Market or any of the other lousy roasters we have around here?  So why serve it?  Because you hate your customers?  No, I know you don’t, so please start serving something better.  Because I do want to go back, but I’ll only be drinking tea.

Lost amid the 634 dingy Mexican joints along S. Public Road (main street downtown Lafayette) is Cannon Mine Coffee.  I’ll start off with the positive: I’m definitely going back there.  The negative: I’m going back on a weekday when I expect they’ll have somebody a little more experienced and faster working the espresso machine (I visited today: lazy Saturday afternoon on Thanksgiving weekend).

I haven’t worked from there yet, but the inside of the shop is something I’ve been looking a long time for in Boulder shops (and still haven’t found).  It’s the kind of wood-heavy, old building look, with worn hardwood floors and comfortable wood tables and leather easy chairs, that you seem to find in the best coffee shops outside of Boulder.  That old wood is like comfort food, and at Cannon Mine they’ve mixed the comfy chairs with high and low wooden tables in a way that feels perfect.

The major downside I foresee is their choice of roasters (Boulder Organic).  It’s just not an impressive choice and while I have serviceable coffees at Espressoria and Tee & Cakes (other shops that serve Boulder Organic), they are not the awesome coffee you get at Ozo, The Cup, and Sidney’s.  Upside is they do carry Bhakti Chai, so that’s a positive choice.

Future visits will complete the picture, but I look forward to heading back.  210 S. Public Rd.

Dateline: Melbourne, early Sunday afternoon

Rain to beat the band stymied my sunny Mt. Arapiles sport climbing aspirations. Stuck in Melbourne between expensive hotel check-out and inexpensive hotel check-in, I wandered the lanes in pouring rain looking for someplace not overcrowded, not nicotine stained and, above all, open. (Why on Earth should any coffee shop be closed on Sunday?)

I had just reached desperation and soak-through when I passed an open warehouse door with no sign on Little Lonsdale street. A peripheral glimpse gleaned, in Euro-slick Melbourne, an unlikely combination of impressions: 1) a large room sparsely filled with shabby second-hand furniture; 2) a cafe bar covered with vintage linoleum; and through the back, 3) a cavernous whitewashed warehouse containing nothing but a brown fixie hovering a few feet off the concrete floor suspended from the ceiling by wires.

Huh?… Two steps later I spun about and peered through the doorway to confirm, in fact, I had discovered a wormhole through space and time to Park Slope, Brooklyn.  It’s called 1000 £ Bend (link).

On a side note, the coffee in this town is universally stellar, no bitter, chalky gutter mud can be found, not even in crappy chinese restaurants. The cap I had at 1000 £ didn’t stand out among Melbourne’s finest, though it’s hardly worth mentioning, it’s better than 85% of the so-called boutique coffee I’ve tasted in the U.S.

To the facts:

1. A red headed Brit having a bright pink cupcake with her cup of tea while lounging in a avocado paisley easy chair
2. Hipster couple humming along to 80’s classic, Died in Your Arms Tonight while sorting art photos on their Apple
3. 60’s vintage racy Ann Margret movie poster for Kitten With A Whip
4. 70’s vintage coin operated cigarette vending machine
5. 80’s vintage music (of course)
6. Goldfish tank R.I.P. list: Jeff Goldblum 27-10-07; Rhianna 2-11-09
7. A bike art gallery and screening room (it appears to be Melbourne’s ground zero for the upcoming BFF, oh, and the hanging fixie is made of wood probably Australian gum tree)
8. Location: 365 Little Lonsdale Street, Melbourne, open every day, good food and great coffee, free wifi

Brilliant!

Of course if 1000 £ was actually in Brooklyn we’d all cry: derivative! boring! the world needs another hipster coffeeshop like I need a hole in the head! But here in Melbourne it restored my faith in humankind (or at least the world-wide reach of hipsterdom). And, compared to actual Brooklyn, 1000 £ is uncramped, unpretentious and the coffee doesn’t suck.

Pulled from the comments:

Everyone! Ozo Coffee Co is hosting a Barista Jam and Spro-Ha! on Sunday Dec. 6th at 4pm. Everyone in the Boulder coffee community is invited, even people who don’t work in coffee. What makes this party exciting for non-baristas is that we are going to use the special environment at Ozo to make the local coffee scene as compact as possible. We have 2 3-group Synesso espresso machines as well as 6 individual grinders. We asked everyone who is coming to bring their favorite espresso, so we will have six different coffees at one time side-by-side! This is something that has been talked about as an experiment in the past, but now we are making it a reality. If you want to try coffee from all over the boulder-denver coffee world, all in one place, this is your chance. So come on by Ozo on Sunday the 6th and try your favorite coffees from your favorite baristas all in the same place!

http://www.baristaguildofamerica.blogspot.com/

It’s kind of a long street, but along its entire stretch there are only two coffee shops, and they’re next door to each other in the block between Pearl and Walnut: Belvedere Belgian Chocolate Shop (website) and Tee & Cakes.  We’ve written about Tee & Cakes a few times, but have missed Belvedere, both in its new location here and its previous location at the same latitude but on 15th.  Belvedere we’ve probably ignored because it sells itself primarily as a chocolate shop that also sells espresso.  In a city saturated with good coffee, that doesn’t work well.  People are spoiled and know that a shop doing espresso as an add-on is very rarely worth the trouble.

I decided to confirm or refute directly.  I mean, they’re right next door to each other, how hard can the comparison be?  So I finally visited Belvedere for the first time and T&C for the 20th.  Results?   It’s like the over-run clip of Dennis Green flipping out about losing to da Bears.

Yep, Belvedere is what I thought they were.  They serve Novo Coffee (out of Denver), but not well.  Wasn’t the worst coffee I’ve ever had, certainly wasn’t the best, somewhere just about slightly below average.  They shop isn’t something you want to work from frequently.  You can do it in a pinch, but it just doesn’t feel right as a work space.  And you’re going to be relying on Pearl St. Mall wireless because they don’t have their own.

Tee & Cakes is also who I thought they were, mostly because I’ve been there a bunch.  I don’t like their choice of roasters (Boulder Organic, just a half step above Allegro), but they make it well enough (read: better than Espressoria pulls it off).  My bone to pick today is how they confuse — like many — latte with cappuccino.  Here’s my rule of thumb: a cappuccino is espresso with a bit of milk flavoring.  A latte is hot milk with some coffee flavor.  You should NEVER be searching for the coffee in the cappuccino because the coffee should be by far the dominant component.  For most coffee shops, even most in Boulder, when you order a cap you’re still getting a latte, and there is very, very little difference between how a shop makes the two.  There should be a huge difference, but for most there is not.

Rant aside, we still love T&C’s cupcake line up and the place is worth visiting for that alone.  Belvedere?  Go there if you need chocolate.

I had posted some reviews and news about The Curious Cup, most recent being that they died.  While praising CC, I was basting their 95th and Arapahoe competition, Brewing Market.  Well Brewing Market is still in business and CC isn’t, so I decided that I should probably suck it up and go work there for an afternoon.

Since I now live out that direction and I don’t want to come into Boulder every day, I was hoping to be pleasantly surprised by Brewing Market on 95th so I could use it as a reliable satellite office.  I was and I wasn’t.

First the good: the layout I like.  Tables on one end with ample elbow room between them and a mix of table sizes.  On the other end is a U-shaped couch and plush chair area that works well.  You can work there, but it is more a comfortable meeting spot, and there were two different groups of people having coffee meetings while I was there.  The entire east wall and much of the north wall is floor-to-ceiling glass which I think is a good orientation since you don’t get afternoon sun barreling down on you and your laptop.

Now the bad: Brewing Market is still Brewing Market.  The coffee sucks and the chai is even worse (hard to think that’s possible, but I confirmed that it is).  The internet policy is that you get access for two hours per order.  I can see the business logic behind it, but it’s shortsighted.  Unless your shop is packed to the gills with laptop zombies all day (ie., Saxy’s), you don’t need to worry about the occasional person who orders one drink and works for 6 hours.  To the rest of the people it’s a turn-off.

It’s too bad that CC went down the loser and Brewing Market stayed around the winner, but for a workspace it is decent.  Just don’t plan on loving your coffee.  If you live in the vicinity, it works.

Long live the Curious Cup, subject of a couple favorable recent posts (although let’s admit it, nothing much has been recent lately on this blog … that’s ok, judging by the stats you’re still reading).  An email went out today announcing the immediate closing of The Curious Cup.

This reviewer is devastated.  Having recently moved closer to Lafayette than Boulder (although still with a Boulder mailing address somehow), Curious had become my new office.  Now I have to go to Brewing Market on 95th and Arap?  No thanks!  Guess I’ll be hitting Ozo more often now.

Stopped by Ozo a few days ago and got my first shot of their new in-house roast.  OMG.  No: O-M-G.  Damn, was that thing tasty.  I had the dark roast (Isabelle) in a dry cappuccino and it was velvety, smoky and sweet without a bit of bitterness.  For my palette Ozo was the only shop that could do anything with Allegro, but thank god they’ve moved on.  Good job, boys!

This reviewer is still in Michigan so if you’re tired of hearing about coffee shops outside of the Boulder area, sorry, but at least for me it’s interesting to observe the contrasts across the country.  It’s especially interesting to see what locals get in small cities in the rural U.S. (I’m thinking population 1,000 – 10,000 and nowhere near a metro area).  These are towns far too small to have a Starbucks, and maybe even too small to have a decent espresso operation, but as I said in a previous post, indie espresso joints are on the rise throughout the heartland.

One such city is Munising in the Upper Peninsula, population a bit under 3,000 but a spry little tourist town that’s home to Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore.  Visiting a couple of weeks ago, we badly needed decent coffee and ended up finding the only real coffee shop in town: the Falling Rock Cafe & Bookstore.  Now this was a real locals joint.  I don’t know how a town of fewer than 3,000 people has enough dedicated cafe regulars to have 300 earmarked mugs on the walls, each with a different customer’s name, but they do.  Maybe our beloved Walnut Brewery has more personal beer steins on its walls than Falling Rock has coffee mugs, but it can’t be by much.  It was nice to see a local coffee shop with such a dedicated following.

Unfortunately, at least in terms of the actual coffee, the good citizens of Munising aren’t given much love in return.  The coffee was disgusting.  I went back twice in a day, both times didn’t drink my drink.  This isn’t snobbery, this is plain, objective fact, confirmed by the multiple adults in our group (only one or two of which are coffee snobs) who tried the coffee.  The first visit we got coffees for 6 people and all were more or less undrinkable.  The second time, different shift, only two coffees and both were bad.  The baristas were friendly but completely untrained.  So maybe it was the baristas, or maybe it was the roast: Great Lakes Coffee.  My guess is that it was both.  Even with a woeful barista the quality of the coffee will still peek through.  Not in this case.  I’m still wondering where the good roasters are outside of Chicago.

The espresso experience was unfortunate, because otherwise Falling Rock is exactly the kind of shop I’d like to have in Boulder.  Physically it is half coffee bar and cafe and half bookstore, both with a good, comfortable feel.  Plenty of tables and chairs in both spaces and a cozy couch in the bookstore.  The cafe portion has a good menu of food options (we didn’t try anything though) with what is absolutely bedrock standard in midwest cafes: ice cream.  Saxy’s can have its gleaming euro stainless steel gelato cooler, but Falling Rock has the standard salt o’ the earth ice cream cooler.  As far as a cafe and bookstore combo, don’t we have that in the Boulder Bookstore?  No, not really.  There we have a huge bookstore attached by a single opening to a very uncomfortable coffee shop (probably Boulder’s most uncomfortable coffee shop).  In Falling Rock the scene is comfortable and mellow, with easy, natural movement between the cafe and bookstore.  At Falling Rock they are built to be together; at Boulder Bookstore the cafe seems like a bastard stepchild appendage.

We got this email a few days ago:

Hi there!

I realize that the coffee shop I am writing about is in Longmont, but it’s still Boulder County and I am sure you have lots of fans out there too!  There is a great new coffee shop –just opened — in Longmont called Corner Coffee Bar. It’s locally owned by Longmont High School alums and local business folks. It’s right next to the Longmont United Hospital, and really conveniently located off of Hover Road at 2130 Mountain View Avenue.  The feel is a little old school, a little hip, but never overtly trendy and has a bold and bright interior and a casual outdoor patio. In addition to a premium selection of specialty coffees and teas, the Corner Coffee Bar menu features a wide array of freshly prepared items including pastries, bagels, panini and croissant sandwiches, snacks, chocolates, and more.  You’ll find all the coffee drink staples, as well as other favorites including real hot chocolate (read: no chocolate-flavored powder here), smoothies, iced and frozen drinks, and sodas. The focus is fresh, simple food with coffee shop standards and a few innovations thrown in.

Probably the most unique feature of Corner Coffee Bar is an exciting new service called Splick•It.  Splick•It, founded and based inBoulder, is an online and mobile ordering service that allows customers to pre-order and pay for drinks, food, and other menu favorites quickly and conveniently from their mobile device. Customers simply choose their store, place their order, and arrive to find their items ready for pick up. Customers can also save regular or favorite orders, indicate when they want the order to be ready (5, 10, 20 minutes, etc.), and browse menu items and daily specials, making it easy and fast to get what you want, when you want it.  Both Corner Coffee Bar and Ziggi’s Coffee House in Longmont are among the very first coffee shops in the country to feature Splick•It.

Go on, go on, go visit.  I’m sure they’re good.  As far as Splick It, a few of us have been in on the testing for months now.  I guess that’s one of the perks of starting a coffee shops blog — you get to try all the new stuff.  Just haven’t posted because it’s still in beta, but some of us use it at Sidney’s.